A fulfillment center is a facility, warehouse or other like structure that is adapted to receive items from vendors or other fulfillment centers, and to store such items in one or more designated spaces or areas therein. Such fulfillment centers may include stations for receiving shipments of items, for storing such items, and/or for preparing such items for delivery to customers. When an order for the purchase of one or more of the items stored in a fulfillment center is received from a customer, the ordered items may be retrieved from the spaces or areas in which the ordered items are stored, and prepared for delivery to the customer, e.g., by packing the ordered items into one or more appropriate containers with a sufficient type and amount of dunnage, and delivering the containers to an address designated by the customer.
Online marketplaces are increasingly popular electronic forums through which customers may place orders for one or more items over the Internet. The growth of online marketplaces, and the rapid expansion in the scope and breadth of their available offerings, has led to a concomitant proliferation of fulfillment centers. Online marketplaces usually use fulfillment centers to allow vendors to maintain inventories of items that are available for sale at the online marketplaces in a centralized location. Upon the receipt of an order for one or more items from a customer, an online marketplace may electronically assign the order to the fulfillment center, and a list of the items included in the order may be provided to a staff member at the fulfillment center. The staff member must physically retrieve the items from the locations in which they are stored, and transport the items to a distribution station in preparation for delivery to the customer. The list of items may be provided to the staff member on paper, electronically (e.g., to a handheld computer maintained by the staff member), or in any other format.
Today's online marketplaces offer a wider variety of items to customers, including but not limited to goods, services, products, media or information. Accordingly, fulfillment centers that are associated with such marketplaces include increasingly large and complex facilities having expansive capabilities and high-technology accommodations for items, such as temperature-controlled spaces for items that must be maintained at or near certain temperatures (e.g., produce), or light-restricted spaces for photodegradable items (e.g., camera film or various ales or stouts). Moreover, in order to accommodate vast numbers and types of items of various sizes, some fulfillment centers featuring storage areas as large as one million square feet or more. Therefore, in order to prepare and ship an order that includes a large number or numerous types of items to a customer, a staff member may be required to walk several thousand feet, or even miles, within a fulfillment center in order to retrieve the items in fulfillment of the order. Where a customer submits multiple orders for items, the arduous task of picking, packaging and shipping ordered items must often be repeated for each and every order.